Lego block and a user story
Recently we got Lego blocks for my 2 year old son. While buying it, I was a bit skeptical due to the large number and the different types of blocks. I was not sure how he would take it. It took him literally a minute to get engrossed into the game. In no time he figured out what to do with blocks and started creating shapes of 2 or 3 blocks. I was surprised at ease with which he mastered fitting lego blocks. Few weeks passed by and I think I enjoy it as much too ☺.
I have been working as a BA/Product owner for some years. I needed to write down what users wanted to achieve from the product and pass it to dev team for development so that users could get what they needed. Mostly these writings were in the form of User Stories. Sometimes stories created problems, sometimes they were good enough. However at the beginning of every new project I am equally nervous about stories. I keep thinking about story splitting, estimating and elaborating to ensure they do their job. It’s always been tricky.
One might ask- why start with Lego blocks to talk about user stories? .
So what’s a user story ? According to Wikipedia -
In software development and product management, a user story is an informal, natural language description of one or more features of a software system. User stories are often written from the perspective of an end user or user of a system.
In a simpler form, user story captures a functionality which user values. This user could be someone using the product for recording the information or viewing information or could be an admin or auditor.
Beauty of user stories is any one can write it and at varying levels. One could start with really a broad objective and then break it down into smaller stories. We usually refer large stories as epics. Story is a discussion document and it evolves as conversations progress. Details can be added at any point in time and any one can add it. However having scope and tasks defined once developer picks up the story for development, helps in keeping things tidy.
When we write stories, we try to create each user story as independent of other stories. We strive to ensure it is valuable on its own, is small enough to get completed quickly and tradable with other story. To me this resembles to something like a Lego block, take any 2 blocks and they can fit into each other. Albeit a careful sequencing is needed to create a meaningful shape, but each block is Independent and can be traded with other. It also has clear characteristics such as size(number of pegs), shape, colour.
More I looked at lego game and how each block contributed in creating different structures, lego block as a principle for user story started making more and more sense. Stories are unit in themselves. Stories need to be independent from each other and make sense on their own. Stories also need to be building functionality for the user which is visible in the product though UI or processing or integration or some other means.
In one of my projects I created stories
- Display criteria page to search transactions with proper UI controls
- Display transactions based on criteria entered (4 or 5)
On their own these stories are quite intertwined. Independently don’t give any value though in a user journey they may be separate steps.
During execution, question came up, how many transactions one can see on a page - 20 may be 50. I realised better way to approach our stories would be
- Display all transactions (or say 100 transactions) with latest transaction first
- Display transactions based on criteria related to date, currency and amount
Having stories which are functionally independent would ensure functionality is just enough to get started and go to users immediately. This means you implement most important functionality first and move on to next important one. While sequence is important, practically after implementing first story we could wait to get some feedback and then decide about relevant search criteria.
Just to be clear, equating lego block to a user story doesn’t create a user story but it’s good start ☺. It gives clear idea how independent stories need to be and how to create them so that they fit in bigger picture nicely.
